Akanda Secures Seed Funding

Funds to accelerate development of the open source network
virtualization software project

April 06, 2015 09:30 AM Eastern Daylight Time

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Akanda,
the only open source network virtualization solution built for OpenStack
environments, today announced it has secured seed funding led by New
Dream Network (parent company of DreamHost), with co-investors The
Fabric, Double M Partners, Rincon Venture Partners, Simon Anderson (CEO
of DreamHost) and Matt Ocko. The funding will enable Akanda to scale out
the technical team, accelerate platform development, and support
production implementations of Akanda by cloud service providers and
enterprises standing up OpenStack clouds.

“Akanda’s sophisticated open source management and orchestration
platform is addressing a real need in the market to improve OpenStack
networking,” said Rajan Raghavan, CEO of The Fabric. “The Fabric is a
company co-creator. We take a unique approach to inspiring, incubating
and investing in next generation innovative technology companies. We
invest in great teams with real-world technologies, helping to build
successful companies who are engaged in creating a new, flexible and
efficient architecture in the networking space.”

Launched in November 2014, Akanda is revolutionizing the network
virtualization industry, delivering the first open source
production-ready L2 agnostic platform for network virtualization.
Akanda’s open source platform eliminates the need for complex SDN
controllers, overlays and multiple plugins for cloud networking by
providing a simple integrated networking stack that manages routing,
firewall and load balancing in secure multi-tenant OpenStack
environments.

“In the past five months, Akanda has experienced a significant increase
in interest and demand,” said Henrik Rosendahl, CEO of Akanda. “Closing
our latest funding round, we could not be more thrilled to partner with
both new investors and founders who share our vision for future growth.
Together we will look forward to continuously delivering a solution that
meets the networking needs of OpenStack users.”

Akanda, Inc. is the major developer and supporter of the open source
Akanda network virtualization software project. Akanda’s networking
platform for OpenStack clouds is changing the future of networking by
delivering an open, extensible and cost effective platform for
enterprises and service providers to virtualize their networks. Akanda
is layer 2 agnostic and powers network virtualization for DreamCompute,
the OpenStack-based public cloud offered by DreamHost. Akanda interfaces
with the OpenStack Neutron REST APIs and includes a sophisticated
management and orchestration platform to monitor, configure, and manage
3rd party virtualized routers, load balancers and firewalls. For more
information, visit www.akanda.io.